What’s wrong with President Obama?

President Barack Obama says that he is less concerned with scoring “style points” for his improvisational handling of the Syria crisis than in “getting the policy right.” This dismissive defense comes at the precise moment that Washington is awash in brutal critiques of the Obama leadership style.

The president’s harried, serial about-faces on Syria — coupled with the collapse of Larry Summers's candidacy for chairmanship of the Federal Reserve — have combined to highlight some enduring limitations of Obama’s approach to decision-making, public persuasion and political management.

John Harris, Todd Purdum analysis

The other side: What’s right with Obama?

Any fair answer would acknowledge Washington’s impatient pack-of-wolves phenomenon — the tendency for the media and operative class to froth at the first sign of weakness — and would recognize that Obama has a foundation of genuine assets that have stayed intact during this summer of discontent.

But it’s also true, as acknowledged even by sympathetic lawmakers and some former Obama West Wingers in recent background conversations, that his presidency is in a parlous state, with wounds that are lately self-inflicted. That’s especially troubling because the unforced errors come in a second term when, historically, presidents are expected to be more clear-eyed and confident about the burdens of command. Here is a short list, based on nearly two decades of close observation of the presidency, of what’s wrong with Obama — at the moment, anyway:

• His mind

Even Obama’s biggest supporters may strain these days to recall one of the things they originally found most appealing about him: His obvious intelligence and the way it projected — casually articulate, coolly rational, comfortable with complexity and nuance. This seemed the perfect antidote to the fumbled syntax and glandular decision-making style of his predecessor.

From a young age, Obama has always been oriented toward deliberation, contingency, and a careful calibration of possibilities and risks. In his twenties, he listened so intently — and responded so noncommittally — to the feuding factions of the Harvard Law Review that all sides believed he had heard them out, and made him their leader. As an Illinois state senator in 2002, he won early attention for a stirring speech against the Iraq War, but also took pains to make clear, “I don’t oppose all wars,” only a “dumb war” or a “rash war.”

For all that some on the right see him as a dangerous radical, his political instincts have always been toward synthesis — borrowing ideas and language from multiple sides — and split-the-difference moderation. Early in his term, he settled on a market-based overhaul of health insurance with an individual mandate to buy coverage not out of deep conviction for this solution but because Republicans had once proposed the idea, even as most liberal Democrats wanted a more aggressive approach. Obama is a pathological rationalist, animated by his belief that the truth is usually not black or white but is found in the gray shades in between, and that reasonable people should embrace the seeming contradictions of divergent views to find a sensible way forward.

But presidents, like mere people, often discover that their flaws are a magnification of their virtues. This president lately has faced situations that cried out for a black-and-white sense of purpose, and unquestioned public command.

In Syria, he set a red-line warning against use of chemical weapons, watched the regime of Bashar Assad ignore it, then seemed to deliberate out loud through a kaleidoscope of options, from a military strike on his own authority, to a military strike with congressional assent, to diplomacy in league with a foreign leader, Vladimir Putin, who had spent the summer humiliating him in the Edward Snowden case. There is a coherent argument for military intervention. And there is another one for saying that that Assad’s atrocities are tragic but a problem for others to solve. But the president’s effort to argue both things came off as incoherent.

With the Summers nomination, Obama had made it clear in conversations with aides and members of Congress that the strong-willed former Treasury Secretary was his first choice to take over the Fed — and he even came to Summers’s public defense when critics attacked his personal and policy record. But Obama also allowed a vacuum to grow in which liberals in his own party felt no compunction about publicly registering their opposition, whatever their president’s preferences.

The common theme in both episodes is that they were about projecting power, not summoning sweet reason. Obama’s approach put him in the position of being bullied — in one case by a sworn enemy, in the other by ostensible friends — who could not have cared less about his own nuanced views. As Churchill once said of the Germans, “The Hun is always at your throat or at your feet.”